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Foreword
Back to Arheled Introduction This tale grew in the telling, till it became not only a reaching back to complete the mythology of JRR Tolkien, but a reaching ahead as well, to the Armageddon and the end of the world. Such an ending is only foreshadowed in this first book, let alone in the subdividing of it into three volumes. When I moved to Winsted in 2010, I felt a great and eerie mystery hanging over it. I spent that year gathering atmosphere, wandering the town and noticing things. And the things that I noticed began to weave themselves together, until a huge mythical structure hung, formless and ungrown, above me. It took me over a year of writing during 2011 (whose weather I carefully and literally reproduced throughout the story) to bring down and incarnate it, and then the story spawned sequels, as all the world’s forces gather to the Great End. Accordingly, since I was constructing this mythology out of real things, I invented as little as possible of the actual places and carvings. The carving under the old bridge at Gilbert was my invention, in order to introduce Temple Fell; however, the Signs of the Nine Hills and the peculiar star patterns indicated by them are exactly as I described them. So are the places in Winsted, and the eerie mountain two miles out of town, and the strange cuts in the rock on Pratt Hill, as well as the pattern in the rock veins of the quarry. The island in the Long Lake, however, is not inhabited by Forest, and the Midwinters (or the family I based them on) do not live in Riverton. All during 2010 I kept having weird flashes of dialogue; strange and mysterious scraps of conversation that looked at the world from a frightening and alien perspective, and yet one so wise it stood the world on end. I knew who it was, of course. Arheled had entered my dreams once before, and I knew he was bound up with this, but I groped ahead as I wrote, and wrote by instinct alone. He has entered other people’s writings; Alfred Noyes knew of him, and the Algonquins had some inkling of him in their complicated legends of the august but humerous Glooskap. Whether he exists in actual fact, or whether he is merely a concept I was inspired with as vehicle to utter truths, I have no idea. The sequences of numbers elucidated in the email string in Book 2 are all real and made of real things, and form deductions exactly as I gave them in Book 6. The discovery of the twin cemeteries right where indicated gave me a very queer feeling, much the same as I had when deducing the celestial indications of the signs of the hills, that I was reflecting reality itself in some manner. But I did not preform the ceremony, and Mjollnir slumbers undisturbed, if it even exists. I did not dare find myself working magic. The girl-talk in Chapter 3 was lifted from four notebook pages I found crumpled up beside a fire ring near Mad River, drafts for a play of some sort and evidently written by a girl. Unwilling to waste such realistic and amusing writing I incorporated it into my own narrative, but I have never found the writer. I should add that Forest’s dream in Chapter Two was mine, though I forgot most of the conversation and it certainly did not include the Double Deed rhyme; in fact, I woke up at the spot where I realized I hadn’t brought writing materials. I did not, however, forget that the Gods dipped pitchers there when they made the Stars. That, in fact, was what made me realize that the Stars were people. Dennis Midwinter’s nightmare is also mine, the only nightmare I have ever experienced, up to the twisted cat at any rate. My other series, The Dark Tower Returns, is closely bound up with the Arheled series, though crossover is kept to a minimum; and is in fact essential for an understanding of the cosmological and spiritual dimensions of the Ragnarok. Daslenga too is more fully explored in that series, and its’ peculiar nature laid out. The Wild Man of Winsted really did happen, and I have related the legend as accurately as I could; but I seriously doubt the reality was anything like the fearsome being I envisaged. At first of course I thought the Wild Man was Arheled himself, but when I had Arheled taunting Ronnie about relativity, he seemed out of character, far too dark and mocking and sinister: and then I began to realize just what the Wild Man was. So great was the feeling of reflecting something real, that I went up to Temple Fell at midnight of Christmas Eve on 2011, and saw nothing, and heard nothing: it was very silent and peaceful there. Nor did the milestone change. James Farrell July 2014